Page 8 of Taming His Teacher

“Had a collision, I see?”

“Yes. God, I’m so clumsy.”

I drop Erin’s wrist and we step back from each other. Erin backs into the pillar and almost spills what’s left of the napkins and a bowl of popcorn. She’s not usually clumsy at all, but it’s a convenient excuse.

“This building with all its nooks and crannies isn’t helping,” Mr. Connelly says. Then he launches into a lecture on how the original building was built the year the school was founded and has been added onto so many times there are at least half a dozen architectural styles incorporated into it. I bet he can name every single last one of them.

He’ll yammer on about this for another twenty minutes. I don’t want to abandon Erin to his boring spiel, which I’m sure she knows already, but, “I should rinse this out. I’ll be right back.”

I hurry to the nearest bathroom and strip to my T-shirt. If I button my jacket over it, you can barely see the red. I hold my button-down under cold water and most of the juice comes out under the stream. It might be salvageable. When I’ve done all I can do, I walk back out. Mr. Connelly’s gone but Erin’s still there, staring, no cup in her hand.

I toss my shirt under a bench and wipe my damp hands on my dress-code khakis.

“Do you like them?”

She turns to me, hugging her elbows and a sweet smile on her face. That’s better.

“I do. I’m sorry about earlier, I…I was surprised.”

I nod. I knew she would be. It’s part of why I did it. I wanted to surprise her.

The drawings I’ve tacked up are half the sketches she’s expecting: the glass still lifes, the other object studies we’ve been working on, a few perspective exercises. But the rest of them, they’re fleeting postures. A hand holding a piece of chalk, the grip of fingers surrounding a dining hall tray, the rounded brim of a baseball hat under the bright sun of a soccer game. I’d had to cull them carefully from the sketchbook I keep wedged between my mattress and the bedframe. Not that the rest are scandalous—Erin dresses conservatively and I don’t chance putting the less-chaste images of her I have in my head to paper—but someone would be able to tell it’s her.

My favorite is one of her heels lifting out of the backs of her shoes as she stretched to reach the top of the board because she’d filled up the rest of it. The definition of her calf muscles and the tiny constellation of freckles to the left of her Achilles tendon are perfection. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed, and there aren’t so many feminine ankles around here. These, though, are innocent. Could be anyone. But they’re not. She knows it and I know it.

She opens her mouth to say something, when Will Chase swings around the corner. His face lights up when he sees her.

“Miss Brewster. I wasn’t sure you’d be here. You spend all your time down here as it is. I thought you’d be bored of this stuff by now.”

The face he makes implies he’s bored already.

“I’ve seen a lot of it before, but not everything. They’ve all been working so hard. Some of them must’ve been working right up until the show, putting on finishing touches. And some of them,” she says, sneaking me a glance, “have been keeping parts of their projects tightly under wraps. Everything’s great.”

She means it, too.

Mr. Chase checks his watch and stares too long at Erin. “Mr. Shepherd, it’s getting on curfew. You should help the other boys clean up and then get back to the dorm. Don’t want to be late for check-in.”

The clock on the wall confirms. I’ve got ten minutes before I have to be up at Ford unless I want a slap on the wrist for being late. I’m tempted to stay here, though. I don’t like the way he’s looking at her. I might do my damnedest to keep my thoughts about Erin Brewster pure and chaste from afar, especially in public, but Will Chase sure as fuck doesn’t. He tears his eyes off her long enough to look down his nose at me, even though we’re about the same height. I might even have an inch on him.

“Yes, sir,” I bite off, grabbing the half-full bowl of popcorn and the napkins Erin didn’t grab in her haste off the pillar. A few steps later, Erin’s voice chimes in my ear. “Well done, Mr. Shepherd. A pleasant surprise.”

The slight emphasis on the word “pleasant” dulls the sharp stab of annoyance at Will Chase’s interruption of something I’d been looking forward to for weeks. What a crap-ass fantasy life I lead. Doesn’t he get enough of her already? He chats her up in the dining hall, walks her toward her classroom after lunch and who knows? He probably invites her to his apartment to “watch a movie” or “read some poetry.” Goddammit. Why does he have to steal one of the only times I have a legitimate excuse to talk to her? I blow a breath out my nose so I don’t sound pissed off when I say this, because I’m not. Not at her.

“Thanks, Miss Brewster. Thanks for coming. Have a good night.”

Then I’m walking away from her. Leaving her in a room full of my drawings and, because you can’t always get what you want, Will Chase instead of me.

* * *

Erin

Shep grabs his discarded shirt from under the bench and walks out, his shoulders stiff under his blazer. My eyes follow him until he turns the corner, and then he’s gone. I turn to see Will staring at me. We’ve gone out a few times, once to a pizza place in town and once he’d brought a DVD and a bottle of pinot noir over to my apartment after lights-out. I couldn’t drink since I was on duty, but I’d substituted some grape juice and we’d clinked the cheap IKEA wineglasses.

After our abortive make-out session a month ago, he didn’t talk to me for days but then he’d started flirting and I’d been pleased.Not nowdoes not meannot everand I’m much more comfortable with the pace things have been moving since. He’d kissed me after our movie date, pressing me against the wall and sweeping his tongue through my mouth.

There’d been no flood of desire like when he’d grabbed me hard in the art building because the gesture was lacking that hot, blatantly sexual aggression. No urge to drop to my knees because there was no rough handling that called to the submissive I suspect lurks somewhere deep inside me. Yes, though the making out didn’t make me weak-kneed, it had been enjoyable. When he feels like it, Will can be enjoyable.

From the way he’s looking at me, he feels like it.

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